I absolutely love ZFS. I use it on FreeBSD for all disks on the whole system, including the ones that FreeBSD itself is installed on, and I use it with some disks on Linux and with most of my external disks with macOS.
In an alternative universe, Mac OS X would have gotten ZFS shipped with the base install back in 2007, and presumably we’d then still have that to this day. In our universe that ended up not happening even though it was supposed to :/ https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/04/28/revisiting-zfs-for-mac/
I really would have loved to have the whole of macOS running on ZFS. But at least using ZFS from homebrew on macOS to have ZFS on external disks is the next best thing after that, and which we do have.
I began learning ZFS (TrueNAS and the macOS-plugin) just two weeks ago. It is absolutely incredible technology.
>I use it with ... most of my external disks with macOS
How do you personally deal with the terrible macOS default SAMBA client (if using SMB shares)? I can get saturated single-file transfers, but even deleting 100+ small files takes a longgggggg time. It is my understanding the the macOS only allows single-threaded SMB access.
I am considering using ExpanDrive (for NAS access only); openZFS is perfect for DAS (direct disk access), albeit not ideal (since the ARC takes away from system memory); is Thunderbolt linkage still impossible in TrueNAS?
How do you connect your mac fastest to TrueNAS (not top speed, actual IO rate)?
Wait until you find out that zrepl[1] exists, what it can do and that it can even be signaled ;-)
1: https://github.com/zrepl/zrepl
>> I use it with ... most of my external disks with macOS
> How do you personally deal with the terrible macOS default SAMBA client
I almost never use SMB. The external disks in question are drives that I connect via USB3 or USB4/Thunderbolt to the MacBook Pro, including a couple 5-bay multi-drive DAS enclosures that have USB4/Thunderbolt.
I forgot that Apple story, a great "what ifs". It's not in the history wing yet, thanks for the link, it might deserve its own panel!